On July 28, Canonical, through Marc Deslauriers, published details about the availability of a new important update for the BIND packages in the Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating systems.

Move over, Ubuntu Touch and Android. There's new competition in town. The KDE community just unveiled Plasma Mobile, a free and open-source mobile operating system.

This is nothing new for the KDE project. Before Ubuntu Touch was ever announced, the KDE community had a long-term vision of convergence. Plasma 5 on the desktop has a “converged shell” that can switch between different interfaces for different device types. KDE even attempted to release tablets with their Plasma software preinstalled, but this never worked out.

On July 28, the NetBSD Project, through Soren Jacobsen, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the second RC (Release Candidate) version of the anticipated NetBSD 7.0 distribution.

The Decentralized Administration of Peloponnese, Western Greece and the Ionian is recommending the use of open source software solutions for its Geographic Information Systems. A memo from the IT department wants all public administrations to start using Qgis.

It was recently brought to our attention that someone made use of the generic Ubuntu MATE 15.04 root file system for aarch32 (ARMv7) based devices introduced a while ago, to run the famous Linux distribution on a MK808B Plus Quad-Core mini TV box device.

4D Systems and Newark Element14 launched a 2.4-inch, QVGA “4DPi-24-HAT” resistive touchscreen for the Pi for $35, said to be the first to use a HAT design.

Last October, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Eben Upton briefly demonstrated an upcoming official Raspberry Pi touchscreen. It’s unclear whether that 7-inch, VGA capacitive touchscreen is still on course, but in the meantime, there are a variety of RPi touchscreen options to choose from. The latest is a 4DPi-24-HAT screen from 4D Systems and distributor Newark Element14. It’s claimed to be the first to offer full compatibility with the Pi’s HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) add-on card standard.

Ubuntu MATE recently decided to drop the Ubuntu Software Center and it will not longer be available with the upcoming 15.10 Alpha 2 release. This is interesting in itself, but this editorial is about another aspect. From the looks of it, a very large part of the Ubuntu and Linux community really hates the Ubuntu Software Center.

What's new in this release (see below for details):
- Fleshed out OpenMP implementation.
- I/O stream support in the MSVCIRT C++ runtime.
- Support for pixel snapping in DirectWrite.
- More support for OpenGL core contexts.
- Various bug fixes.

Following the trend of privacy-respecting products and projects coming out of Europe (e.g., ownCloud, Kolab, and Plasma Mobile), German firm struktur AG has started a Kickstarter project called Spreedbox, which aims to offer a secure audio video conferencing service. According to the project page, “The Spreedbox is a unique device for secure audio/video conferencing, text and video messaging and file sharing. The Spreedbox is your own conferencing, meeting and file exchange service on the Internet and puts the control and security of your data into your own hands.”

A typical summer research program—the institute's Nanobio Research Experience for Undergraduates, for example—brings students together to one host university, where they work in different laboratories on various projects. In the new pilot training program on Computational Biomolecular, students use an open-source software called Rosetta to work together on problems in computational biology and are mentored by faculty who are part of a global collaborative team known as the Rossetta Commons. The software gives users the ability to analyze massive amounts of data to predict the structure of real and imagined proteins, enzymes, and other molecular structures.

Open source foundations are nothing new. Linux Foundation has been around since 2007, and other major projects like the Eclipse code editing tool and the Apache web server have been governed this way for even longer. Many of the most important open source projects in recent years, such as the Hadoop big data crunching platform and the database system Cassandra, are managed by the Apache Foundation. But it’s unusual to see so many new foundations created so quickly.

Details about a couple of Apache HTTP Server vulnerabilities that have been found and fixed in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have now been published by Canonical in a security notification.

Following three years of development and nine months of testing, Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Tuesday announced that its Aurora database engine is now generally available to customers.

AWS first debuted Aurora during its re:Invent conference in November 2014, positioning the database as a lower cost, higher performance alternative to the widely used open source MySQL database and other similar commercial offerings.

Proteus is a powerful laptop from Entroware that ships only with Ubuntu and Ubuntu MATE. Its makers have just announced that they are now equipping the Proteus model with a video card at no extra cost for new users.